The Healing (10 page)

Seeing her man enjoying himself, Aunt Sylvie decided to push him into talking. “What you reckon, Silas?” she asked, reminding everybody he was still among the living. “What you figure that cabin’s for?”

In the old days, before he got in crossways with the mistress, they said Silas was the first to know anything. He received his information mouth to ear from the master. And some said the master got his orders mouth to ear from Silas. Said Silas was the one who laid out the entire plantation, designing the complicated system of levees, dams, drainage ditches, and irrigation canals. Silas was just as dark as Granada, though she had never heard anybody bringing it to
his
attention.

“Yeah, what you think, Old Silas?” Chester laughed. “You think the master going to get him a gal that’s been bred from a setting hen?”

Old Silas looked around the table. His eyes were dark, the whites nearly yellowed. He seemed surprised he had been spoken to. He then nodded slowly and answered, his voice faint and trembling with age and memory, “That’s what he needs most, I reckon.”

Chester and Pomp laughed, probably thinking Silas was making a joke. Old Silas acted like he hadn’t heard them and kept talking into his coffee cup. “He’s lost many a head over the years to sickness. The yellow fever. The cholera. But he never bought from off the plantation unless things were awfully bad.”

There was a nodding of heads. They all had stopped smirking and started listening.

“That blacktongue must be taking out more hands than we know about. It’s been as bad as the cholera was,” he continued and then gave a half grin. “Yep, maybe that’s just what he needs now, Chester, a flock of first-rate breeders.”

“Those were some terrible days,” Sylvie remembered aloud. “We carried those poor souls out by the wagonful.”

“Sure cut down on his breeding stock,” Old Silas added. “But Master Ben never went off the place to buy. Doesn’t believe in it. Doesn’t like to buy bad habits.”

“He’s a stubborn man,” Sylvie said. She leaned in and spoke just above a whisper, “Lost his own daughter because of that bull head of his. I could have told him. ‘Now you listen to me, Master Ben, it was me who washed and shrouded her body. And don’t you reckon I
know? The Angel of Death that took Miss Becky was the exact same color as the one what took all the rest of them …’ ” Sylvie let her words trail off. “He still ain’t admitted that the sickness made it past a white man’s door.”

“Now it’s the blacktongue,” Old Silas said. “Last I counted he got twenty-five hands out at Mott’s quarter on their backs ready to up and die on him like they’re doing ever place else in the county. Master Ben buried three himself.”

“I hope the master learned his lesson,” Aunt Sylvie said, and then closed her eyes. “Please, God, don’t let it travel here to us. ‘Death he is a little man, he go from door to door …’ ”

Chester, rarely serious, now seemed dispirited. “Don’t know what he’s going to do with them that’s already down with it. I know he ain’t going to ask me to fetch that Dr. Barbour. Calls him the killing doctor. I suspect he’s right. I heard of one gal so scared of that man and his purgatives she let her baby die from the measles instead of turning the child over to that white doctor. That’s sure what they call him. The killing doctor with his black bottle of medicine.”

“Same all over,” Pomp grumbled. “Everybody saying it’s best to let it roll with God than tell your miseries to any white doctor. Puke and purge is all they know. Treat you like a field mule. Old Silas is right, it must be going to get a lot worse if the master is buying off the place.”

“That what he needs all right,” Silas said again, “a flock of powerful breeders.”

Chester rose from the table and looked down upon the morose group. He laughed darkly. “I guess Old Silas answered my riddle. Master bought him some gal with hips as broad as an oxen yoke. A gal so fertile, the master won’t never have to buy off of the plantation again.”

He slapped his hands together at the thought. “It’ll sure be a sight. I’m going to be right there in the yard watching when they tote in that gold goose and set her down on her nest.”

A
unt Sylvie hurried from the smokehouse, gripping a leg of mutton like an ax. She called out to Granada, “Master Ben going to be here most any minute, and he got that miracle slave with him! I seen the dust rising up along the levee. Bound to be them.”

Granada was at that moment shooting marbles with Little Lord under the live oak. She was as curious as anybody to see what this slave from up the country looked like. It had been all anyone had talked about for weeks. But she wasn’t curious enough to lose her precious marbles to the master’s boy. The blond-headed cheater was at that moment positioning himself for his next shot.

As she passed under the tree, Sylvie fussed at Granada. “I told you to get that boy cleaned off! Master come home to Little Lord looking pig-dirty and you’ll be the one to catch the feathers for sure.”

Granada still didn’t answer.

Sylvie huffed and then continued her lope toward the kitchen, calling out over her shoulder, “I ain’t got time to fool with you, gal. Don’t blame me when you get the strap.”

That particular threat carried no weight with Granada. The mistress wouldn’t allow Master Ben to harm her.

Granada kept both eyes glued to the red-clay marble in Little Lord’s tight fist, watching him knuckle down for his shot. He was the
worst marble-cheater in the world, and she could tell right then from the way his alabaster cheeks had reddened, his mind was clearly on just that.

“Look!” Little Lord shouted. “The bull got loose!”

Granada swung her gaze toward the barn, and as soon as she did, Little Lord reached over and dropped his marble into the duck hole instead of knuckle-shooting it like he was supposed to. But he had not been fast enough. Granada whacked the boy upside the head with the flat of her hand. His face clouded and then he took off running for the great house, threatening to tell his mother.

Granada was quick on his heels. “Master Little Lord, you better not tell on me or I’ll yank a knot in your noggin for sure!”

She meant it. Granada knew she wasn’t supposed to be nasty to the boy, but sometimes she didn’t know what got into her. When he acted so full of the devil, she couldn’t resist being mean. It did her spirits good to take a whack at him every once in a while. And sometimes that yellow-headed, blue-eyed boy was just too pretty for his own good.

Little Lord had made it up the stairs and onto the gallery when he stopped dead in his tracks. “Daddy’s home!” he shouted, and then ran to the railing, pointing off in the distance. “And he’s got the bought slave with him!”

This time he wasn’t fooling. Granada looked in the direction the boy was pointing and saw a storm of dust rising off the Delphi road. The master was riding out ahead of the roiling cloud on his black horse. Granada sucked in her breath at the sight. She loved to see the master ride, switching his whip, making that big-blooded stallion fly, its muscles sleek and sweaty and pulsing, all shiny and beautiful and sassy. She wondered how the master managed to keep his seat with a horse so fast its hooves were nothing but a blur of motion and dust.

Coming up close behind was a speeding wagon, driven by what she first took to be an old woman because of the two long black plaits of hair dangling from beneath a beat-up felt hat. Then Granada
second-guessed herself. It couldn’t be a woman. The driver handled the four-mule wagon like a man, spitting tobacco off the side of the wheels and popping the reins sharply. A Choctaw Indian maybe!

Little Lord took off down the steps and Granada took off after him. At the foot of the stairs Granada came to a stop, but Little Lord continued to race toward the galloping horse. Master Ben grasped the boy under the arm and hoisted him up into the saddle. From his perch between his father and the pommel, Little Lord found Granada’s eyes and then stuck his tongue out at her. They both exploded into fits of giggles.

A spirit of hilarity hung over the entire plantation. For days servants had been in a state of high anticipation. Like Granada, the younger ones had never seen a bought Negro before, and the older ones thought they might never see one again, especially one from as far away as the Carolinas.

The whole yard came out to watch. Washwomen and spinners and weavers, dairy and stable hands, the children too young to work and the old ones too feeble, they all gathered in the yard. From inside the mansion, house slaves peeked out from French plate windows. Even Mistress Amanda stepped onto the upstairs gallery with Daniel Webster perched upon her shoulder and watched as the wagon rolled into the yard.

The driver jerked back on the reins and the horses pulled to a stop in front of the new four-room cabin while everybody stood there with chins nearly touching the ground.

It was a woman after all!

“Lord, she a sight!” Granada whispered to herself. She had never seen anything like her. The stranger was reddish brown with pointed cheekbones and amber eyes. Bird feathers stuck out of her braids this way and that, and around her neck she wore a ponderous necklace made of gleaming white shells. She was as skinny as a river bird, and draped over her shoulders was a mangy wrap made from the fur of some animal Granada imagined being too ugly to ever have lived.

Granada heard the whispers all around her.

“Got some Indian in her, that’s for sure!”

“Mostly African, still.”

“Exactly what kind of creature is it?” they asked one another.

She was too unsightly to be thought of as frolic in bed for the master. She was too far past her childbearing years to multiply the stock. Though she seemed nimble enough, it was hard to imagine her being brought all the way from North Carolina for field work.

Granada surprised herself by laughing out loud with glee, but not only at the woman’s outlandish manner of dress. It was the way the odd-looking stranger jerked back on the reins, tied them off, and then jumped down off the wagon, spry as a pullet chicken. Granada eased closer to get a better look.

She wasn’t the only one.

Aunt Sylvie and the servant girls came out into the yard to inspect the odd sight, all of them gathering in a tight knot at the kitchen steps, unable to take their eyes off the gangly, yellow-eyed woman.

“She old as black pepper,” Aunt Sylvie whispered. “Got wrinkles you could grow cotton in.”

“But she can manage them mules like a crack hand,” came Chester’s reply.

People began to speculate aloud that there had to be somebody worth five thousand dollars hiding under the dusty tarpaulin in the back of the wagon. Maybe the master had bought him a bunch of children after all, and she was the used-up mammy thrown into the bargain.

But not a peep emerged from under the wagon’s tarp.

All eyes went back to the woman, waiting for her to do something worth a pot of gold.

First thing she did was walk with a limber-jointed step across the yard right up to the new cabin with the huge brick chimney. She disappeared through the door and then emerged a few moments later with hands on her hips like she had taken ownership. She strode right
over to where the master had reined his horse to a halt and was lowering Little Lord down from the saddle.

The master opened his mouth to speak, but before he could get a word out, she looked him square in the face and said, “I’ll need me a couple of hands to unload the wagon and get everything moved in.” Her voice was firm and clear-throated.

Master Ben commenced to turn as purple as bullis grape. He lifted himself up in his stirrups, clenching his jaw so that the muscles in his face bulged.

The servants watched the master’s reaction with great apprehension. Though he was known to be slow to the whip, preferring to get rid of troublesome slaves rather than beat them, he surely couldn’t stand for this. Granada didn’t hear one person take a breath.

Master Ben finally swallowed hard and barked at two old yard hands to wait on the woman. There followed a wave of headshaking from the onlookers.

Next she took to bossing the pair of hands like she had Master Ben. With a voice that sounded curiously comfortable with authority, she told the old men to unload her wagon. They didn’t argue and got right to it, unfastening the tarp and then whipping it off.

Not a child to be seen. Instead, the wagon was filled with all sizes of gourds and bulging burlap bags, intricately woven coiled-grass baskets and glazed pots of all sizes made out of clays of strange hues.

Granada whispered to Aunt Sylvie, “Did she bring her own grub to eat, too?,” thinking she was some special kind of creature, like the mistress’s pet monkey.

Aunt Sylvie shrugged. “Girl, I got no idea. But I’m going to tell you one thing I do know. Ain’t none of it coming in my kitchen. That woman makes the hair crawl off my head.”

They all watched silently as she walked toward her cabin, but when she got to the doorway she stopped and turned around. She stood for a moment with her chin lifted and her eyes closed.

What on earth was she doing? Granada wondered.